Thursday, December 24, 2015

In I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast, Melissa Studdard makes no
distinction between the sacred and the profane. She hears grace in everything,
serving up poems that allow us to experience it “in the coffeemaker’s drip, in
the crying infant next door, / in the annoying whirr of the window unit blowing
air.” But do not think that her poetry is steeped in sheer naturalism. Studdard
believes that the world of dreams and visions and other dimensions is as real
as “a bedroom / in which we are making love.” Her images shape-shift, and her
poems drift easily between immanence and transcendence. “Don’t / try to
understand,” she advises:

Just
paint the air human,

take off your
clothes,

hand back your
coat of arms.

What you mistook
for a person

is really a
country

with a dark and
sacred history

and no scholars to
explain away the confusion.

Just burn the
archives down.

Everything we have
to know

we learned from a
picture of dreaming.

Everything we need
to remember

can fit on a scrap
of paper

smaller than your
hand.

Talking along in
this not-quite-earthly, not-quite-heavenly way is what Studdard does best in
this impressive first collection. Grounded in history (that of both objective
events and subjective emotions), yet reaching for the ineffable, there is a
half-hidden biography in these poems. Writing about Hildegard of Bingen in
“Tithing,” Studdard proclaims “In…dreams I am your Jutta, your Volmar, // your
confessor, your scribe… // you are the tithe to above from a bankrupt world.”
In “Integrating the Shadow,” the poet states, “I was a bird in the hand of God.
// I was two in the bush, // the yin to my own yang, yang to yin, / drinking
gin on the porch at midnight, / or otherwise drinking tea—you see // how it
is—Bach on Tuesdays—Thursdays / acid rock, tie-dyed t-shirts and jeans.”
“Daughter (for Rosalind)” begins “Because I was a cave, / and you were the bird
that flew through/ my hollows, when
they bathed the pain away, the light on your face looked like / peace after a
long and onerous / war.” The poem concludes with

I tell you, Athena
sprung

from
my own split

Head.
Because emergence is a teaching.

Because
your hands and feet

were
softer than sand. Because before

there
were canyons

or
valleys or lakes or winds,

you
curled your hand around my finger,

and, with your touch, delivered the all.

“Kiss the World
with my Wounded Mouth” is emblematic of those few poems that may do too much
work for some readers. Although she merely points toward love with “…that wild
animal, / [her] own body, and take[s] up residence / inside the thatched hut /
of [her] soul,” inviting us to “…Look / how [she] makes love to the reach of
light / angling in from the east, to the sound of hooves / on hard ground, to
the ground itself,” and she shows sensitivity and restraint with “how [she]
embrace[s] / the jostle of water / sloshing against the side of a boat,” the
poet cannot contain herself in these closing lines:

Nothing can stop
me

from
offering my own exploding

heart
from my two hands. Nothing

can
stop me

from
trespassing

through
the weedy and nettled

plots
of love.

If this passage seems to border on
sentimentality, take into account that the poet has earned the right to speak
this way by spending far more time in the book speaking to our “atoms [that]
have come to worship / and rejoice at the temple of the familiar”—those
particularities she speaks of in “For Two Conversion Therapists Who Fell in
Love and Became Gay Activists:”

Listen when God
knocks on the door in the morning

and
says, I brought you a paper, some orange
juice,

and two Eden-colored
plums. The truth is

God
is sprawled naked across the sky. The truth is

God
runs the bordello inside your heart. It’s full

of
all life’s misfits you tried to hide: the mullet

and
skinny legs, the letters you wrote to the man

next
door but never sent, your secret affinity

for
reality TV. Make love to every luscious thing

you
find there.

In this poem, as
in most, Melissa Studdard’s language makes love to many of the familiar things
in our lives, showing them to be luscious with her gorgeous diction. The
sensualism that is always simmering just beneath her lines does occasionally
boil over the lip of the poem. When this happens, she masterfully turns down
the heat, stirs, and starts cooking her magic again.

was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for over a decade. Terry has published in numerous literary journals, including Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered six Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His first full-length collection of poems, In This Room (CW Books, 2016), is now available, and his second, Dharma Rain, was released by Saint Julian Press in October of 2016. Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College, an assistant editor at Trio House Press, and a free-lance poetry consultant. For more information about him and his work see www.terrylucas.com

"I'm going to stare at the whorled grain of wood in this desk...to make it confess everything." LL

About Me

was born in the Midwest, grew up in New Mexico, and has lived in the San Francisco bay area for over a decade. Terry has published in numerous literary journals, including Best New Poets 2012, Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Great River Review, New Millennium Writings, and The Comstock Review. His work has garnered six Pushcart Prize nominations. He is the winner of the 2014 Crab Orchard Review Special Issue Feature Award in Poetry. His chapbook, Altar Call, was a winner in the the 2013 San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, and appears in the Anthology, Diesel. His chapbook, If They Have Ears to Hear, won the 2012 Copperdome Poetry Chapbook Contest, and is available from Southeast Missouri State University Press. His first full-length collection of poems, In This Room (CW Books, 2016), is now available, and his second, Dharma Rain, was released by Saint Julian Press in October of 2016. Terry is a 2008 poetry MFA graduate of New England College, an assistant editor at Trio House Press, and a free-lance poetry consultant. For more information about him and his work see www.terrylucas.com